The US urges the members of SC2 to review and consider the concerns
raised in the recent US comments on ISO 8859-7 in SC2 N3382. Please urge
the editor of ISO 8859-7 to accommodate the comments of the US National
Body! The US are very concerned that the addition of GREEK QUESTION MARK
would cause very serious implementation and data conversion problems. De
facto, all implementations of 8-bit based Greek processing have been unifying
the Greek question mark and the Semicolon symbol. Creating a dis-unification
at this stage will make obsolete all existing data created with the previous
8 bit Greek encoding. Furthermore, based on the ambiguity of the current
usage, we see no easy way to update or migrate existing data to the proposed
standard. Finally, the proposal also introduces another difference in the
content of ISO 8859-7 and the Microsoft code page 1253 which is very broadly
used in Greece.